


The Final Transmission

by MilkshakeKate



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Dubious Science, F/M, Friendship, Mad Science, Minor Original Character(s), Mission Fic, Mutual Pining, POV Multiple, Pre-Relationship, THRUSH, Teamwork, World Domination
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 11:09:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9892946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: They aren't the first to infiltrate the facility, but they must be the last. All prior attempts at shutting down the weapon have failed. With no other choice, Waverly's tireless, ragged campaign to prove his agency's mettle has been accepted... begrudgingly.The world's luck is running out. What it needs, Waverly had contested, after a lengthy meeting with Gaby Teller, is some fresh oil to flush out the valves.i.e: World domination, satellites and radio waves, THRUSH, and how those cursed U.N.C.L.E. agents are at it again.





	1. A Cord to Bind

**Author's Note:**

> Overambitious plot of an indeterminable length (maybe another 30k+ my god) and a boatload of dubious science after two months AWOL - apologies and best wishes! I have missed you all! Audience Rating will inflate with each chapter, primarily for violence (speaking of: I promise all guns belonging to Chekov will go off in time), but sadly not for my typical........ deviations.

U.N.C.L.E. AUTH:  
NY, U.S.A    

SERIAL ██████  
OPERATION: STREAM  
█████, SWITZERLAND

JAN 11 1964 

  

    **Gaby**           

  

The mountain range is torn paper held to a sky of dark, Alpine blue. The air is thin and the sun is blistering, still forcing a squint behind their deep-tinted goggles. 

Gaby revels in her success now just as she revels in any opportunity to be smug. After a four day climb, she and Illya are two ants scaling a mound of sugar, finally able to take a taste.   

“I told you,” she boasts to her transceiver. “Intuition. Over.”         

Illya’s white hood batters against a brisk gust as he shrugs their gear bag higher on his shoulders. The fur lining his face does little to warm the scowl off him. “How useless, bringing the map, the compass,” he says, louder for the wind in their ears. His voice crackles over the isolated signal, deep and booming in the hood of her coat. “Next time we are in Pacific ocean, we will ask this intuition to find land. Over.”         

Gaby smirks at her boots. She pinches her transceiver and steps foot onto the untrodden pass. “Don’t sulk, over.”        

“Be careful,” Illya retorts with the same sanctimonious tone. He trudges behind her, anchoring the line attached to the belt around her waist and giving a very pointed: “Over.”    

He has said nothing but the same since they’d left the safe house. He has been so close, so cautious since their last mission together. But although the yellow cord tied between them has been stretching longer and longer, and despite all his fear for her hurrying ahead of him of late, he doesn’t tug her back. He won’t. He had even asked if she wanted to lead the line. He had asked her to scout ahead of him. He so often insists on doing the work himself if it is to be done correctly. It had taken a lot for him to offer it to her. It is refreshing, this new trust, and hard earned. She treats it with respect if not with a little apprehension. Illya’s behaviour is a marker she regularly keeps an eye on — only, these days, it is more for the nerves he sets off in her chest than in her head.     

“There it is,” Gaby indulges, and peers over her shoulder.   

Illya only shakes his head at her; it is always her game, insisting that he acknowledge the tally she has on him.   

The mouth of the cave is thin on the face of the mountain, no more than a shadow if one didn’t know where to look. But Gaby has studied the aerial photograph for weeks. Every detail is a bump in a road she has taken a hundred times before; topographical, tangible under her fingers. She doesn’t forget. It comes with absorbing foreign street names and unorthodox shortcuts in every new city. It’s muscle memory to her now. Illya relies on her singular skill often, as she does on him when there are bones to break.      

“Go ahead,” he confirms.  

Gaby takes to the narrow slope leading down to the cave mouth. She keeps the white ridge curving around the mountain face in her sights. She knows there is a precipice waiting for her there; flat, safe foundation formed naturally from the rock. But the path is slippery and discouraging, shining wet in the shadows and shrinking tighter the further it leads. She doubts Illya’s boots will fit if he is to breach it as she plans to; face pressed to the rock, clinging on for dear life.    

The walk had been built to code over thirty years ago, long before THRUSH's seize of the mountain range. It’s unlikely to have been used since, with its guide rope railing torn to tatters. The frost and thaw and whipping winds have turned the cord to horse hair, straggling from its rusting hooks in the rock.   

Illya waits at the end of the ridge while Gaby begins to sidle across it, her two ice axes at the ready. She edges down the narrow foot way and comes to the bend at its corner, finding at last the protrusion of rock at the opening of the cave.         

When something pricks in her inner ear.         

The blood drains from her legs.     

Gaby frowns at her numbing feet — and then down, and down, and down at the sheer drop, and the bowl of snow thousands of metres below. It roils in her stomach. Her head spins, light and liquid, and she grasps at the rock face for the steady black stone, for the frozen over snow, for anything.        

Her axes drop. She doesn’t even feel their absence from her gloved, bloodless hands. The axes dash on the rock and spin, two black shapes shrinking until they disappear into the white.       

Illya is shouting. When she looks, he’s gripping the cord like it’s him who is falling, his feet planted in the snow, skidding for purchase.  

She can’t… She can’t hear. Her balance is knocked, her limbs lost. She staggers the last few feet of the path when her boots catch on the rock ledge and she trips, chin smashing down on stone foundation with a skull-jolting crash.      

Gaby scrambles to her knees, tears welling in her eyes for the shock to her bones. She splays her gloved hands flat to the precipice. She can’t lift them from the rock to cover her ears. She’s wobbling all over, her muscles stunned.       

Her radio squeals. Interference screeches higher and higher until it cuts out to nothing.     

“I-Illya?” she tries, not daring to take her hands off the rock to open her signal. Her eyes ache, her teeth too tight in her jaw. She squeezes both tight and cranes over her shoulder.    

He’s on the ridge, his goggles pushed up and wielding both his black axes, shouting and urging her with a hard tug on the rope — he wants her to anchor him.         

Gaby spreads her gloved fingers wide over the rock and she crawls, her head pierced through from back to front. That couldn’t have been… Her ears trickle like they’re bleeding. It can’t just be the interference, surely not... It was higher than that, nauseating, from another plane of sound, scratching at her ear drums like the cries of bats and knives ripping taut leather.   

She presses one ear to the puff of her arctic coat and covers the other with her glove. She struggles further into the shelter of the cave where wooden beams hold up the stone, and the sunless tunnel is freezing damp and dripping.         

Gaby drops her hand from her ear only to feel for solid ground, to jam the anchoring point in and tie the knot to keep Illya tethered. 

Then she lies on her back, holding the cord around her belt as tight as she can, and prepares for his vast weight to plummet.         

The world shrinks to dead silence. Merciful and frightening. But neither is a good sign; the absence of it, the inevitability of its return. Gaby knows only dread and the rush of her own pulse in her brain. 

The wind gusts by the opening of the cave, taking the lightest snow with it in plumes of white. She listens for Illya’s breathing, for the rustle of his coat, for his axes in the rock, anything.         

Nothing.         

“Illy—”         

A thunderous crack splits through the range, a shotgun in the hollow of her ear. Gaby twists in knots, both palms clapping to her ears as another shrill hiss slices through after it. Her hands do nothing — it cuts through flesh and bone. She grits her teeth so hard they could turn to dust, scrunches her eyes shut.    

“Illya!” she cries out, scrambling further into the cave, closer to the anchor to brace him.         

She can’t take her hands off her ears. The pressure is suffocating, the loudest thing she’s ever heard and it won’t stop.   

The cord around her waist yanks down hard and her eyes widen, her palms numb. She grabs at the rope and blinks through the deafening shrill, her tears coming out in streams, and grips the yellow cord as hard as she can. It’s slipping — her boots can’t find grip on the rock and she’s dragged back to the entrance, to the precipice and the drop.   

One noise breaks through the rest. Gaby knows the sound. Like a tree struck clean in two by lightening, like an apartment block detonated from below, it comes. Every wooden beam splinters, splitting, and the stone too, tearing coarse down the middle above her and the blue sky and all the white peaks are swallowed up by its crumbling black.   

  

 

Her first instinct is to shout. To scream, even, into the darkest place she’s ever been.        

She can’t find breath. She can’t belt anything out. Like she’s low on oil, an engine soaking wet, she can’t find the choke point. It stutters and stutters and stutters until she has to hold onto her jaw, force it closed to keep from chiselling away at her own teeth.        

On her back Gaby tears off her gloves, shoves up her goggles, unzips her coat. She presses her palms to her stomach to feel for the kicking pulse of her own muscles and guts. 

She won’t panic.        

In ballet she had learnt to engage every ligament, to string out every tendon until they came close to snapping like catgut. She does that now. She takes stock of her whole body in the dark, still counting the rabbit-like beat of her heart to keep her steady. Toes and ankles and calves in her snow boots. Her knees, too, are in tact. Her thighs, her hips, her back, her chest — and there are her lungs, her throat. Her own. She has found them. She breathes in, and out. Every gasp rattles and quakes, shallow under her ribs.        

She shouldn’t shout, though she has to. She doesn’t know what else is in the cave; who else might hear her besides Illya, if he even could.        

Feeling for the radio, Gaby heaves a shaky sigh of relief on finding it still pinned lopsidedly to her lapel.  

She pinches the transmitter, tries to steady her grip.        

“Come in, Illya,” she tries. Her voice is weak, but it’s there. She clears her throat, presses an elbow into her ribs to ground herself. “Illya, come in. Over.”     

“Are you hurt?”         

She closes her eyes tight, exhales. “No. Are you? Over.”        

He’s holding the transmission button before he can find the words. He’s out of breath too and, just as much unlike him, she notices he’d missed his sign out. But the signal has pulled through. It recuperated after the wave — damaged, but salvageable. So either the machine has malfunctioned in its attempt to smother the signal, or U.N.C.L.E.’s technicians will drink on Gaby’s tab for a month.   

There is hope yet.  

“What do you see?”     

“Nothing.” Gaby rubs her eyes with the back of her hand, huffs shallowly. “No, nothing. I-if there was any power in here, it has been cut by the wave, or the collapse. Illya, I think… Did you feel it? Over.”  

“Yes. I had not expected them to activate it with this air traffic. They did not call in their units. There are wrecks on the plateau. This test was not planned — I think perhaps it is not a test at all.”        

Only THRUSH’s own aircraft could have been affected by the attack. There had been nothing else in their airspace all week; she and Illya had avoided the aerial surveillance sweeps for the entire climb. They had been forced to throw themselves down into the snow when the planes swung too low, their silhouettes spotted through the cloud and fog. The poor visibility had been their only friend for the first few days. This morning had been crystal clear, and to have reached the mountain base’s forgotten exit on this side of the range was a fluke. THRUSH had been more preoccupied with the countdown to the wave than maintaining their own territory, confident in their defences while she and Illya were already half way to the peak.    

She doubts they will descend with such ease once their work here is done.        

“I didn’t see you make it to the rock,” she tells him.     

“No, I did not. The cord is stuck under the rubble. I am tethered.”     

“You fell?!”        

“I was climbing when you made contact. My axes are gone.”  Irritation laces his voice, low. “Give me some time. I will be there soon. Don’t move.” 

“Over,” she reminds him. With such tenuous strain on the signal, and on the cord holding his whole weight, she would rather know when he intends to end his transmission. The black transceiver on her lapel is a cord of its own. She can't hear anything from the outside. Illya will not be able to hear her even if she were to scream for help. If her memory of the blueprints are wrong, and there is no entrance at the end of this tunnel? Or if it's impenetrable? If Illya can't break through from the outside? What else is there for her to rely on but this little black box?  

Gaby grips the radio, ready to bully him if he doesn't reply.  

“Over and out,” he relents. 

Gaby rests back on her hands. Good. Time, she tells herself. Just give him time.        

Illya is not one to improvise. This plan is four months in the making, and he tends to join the mission’s downward trajectory if anything shifts off its meticulous schedule. Nothing KGB cannot handle, he used to say. So proud, shoulders squared, wholly in denial, until the three of them could botch a plan B and he could grumble his reluctant agreement. He says that less often lately; nothing we cannot handle he’d confirm, confident now in their singular skills converging to one whole.     

Only they are not one whole like this. For the first time in U.N.C.L.E.'s history, the three of them are scattered beyond their control.  

If Solo were here he would suggest the wildest, most miraculous plot to storm the base in plain sight, shooting first and asking questions later. He'd snatch a few useful documents and valuables along the way. Messy, hurried, a thief’s success. For all his flaws Gaby has missed working with Solo for the past two months of his absence. His cool optimism is as nauseating as it is infectious, but that innate luck of his tends to bring all three of them home with the same number of limbs they left with.   

If Gaby was out there, she and Illya might scale the mountain down to the guard camp at the range's centre. It's a backup plan she had confirmed with Waverly, discussing orienteering tactics alongside dry biscuits and tea; an alternate entry point, heavily guarded but nothing Illya can't handle. Illya, out of sorts these days, had left the navigation to Gaby in favour of studying the machine. He had not even accepted the possibility of his absence, or hers, still so strung up on their last mission together. She knows it inhibits him. The guilt. He has kept close. He will keep close.   

Yet here they are. 

It’s impossible to gauge her situation at all while sitting useless on the floor.        

So Gaby rolls the tethered cord between her fingers and follows it on her knees. She shuffles in the pitch black until the cord streams downward, diagonal, and her guided hands graze down to the rubble seam between fallen rock and the cave floor, trapping the rope between its teeth. Illya is on the other side. She has lost her axes, she recalls distantly, then furiously. Not that they’d do much good. There are no cracks in the stone to pry apart, no light streaming in.        

No new air, either.        

She turns to lean back against the rock and closes her eyes for an age.       

Her radio crackles back to life.      

“There is no break in the rock, this side. Even with axe it would take days.” He’s out of breath again, though he tries to hide it with well-placed cuts in his transmission. She waits for his over, when he says, “I cannot get to you, Gaby.”       

Gaby swallows and nods into the dark. “Then I will scout ahead. The blueprints had a maintenance room with two exits, one leading into the lowest level, over.”        

“The prints were speculative.”         

“I haven’t had the chance to look around yet,  _over_.”        

“You cannot see anything... Over.”        

“I’ll keep to the walls, over.”        

“You will lose signal within one hundred meters. I cannot follow you.”        

“I know,” Gaby says, readying herself to stand. “I will come back here to report in an hour, over.”        

“If you are not back in one hour?”        

She takes down her hood and huffs, blowing her hair out of her eyes. “Call Waverly.”        

“Hm. After this, surveillance will be high. Extraction will take twenty-four hours minimum. No close air support with ground to air defence so tight. Foreign aircraft restriction will be doubled now. If defences cannot be lowered, Mr. Waverly will send back-up the way we came, on foot.”  

That had taken them four days.         

“I will contact Solo,” Illya goes on. “The assets will guide him inside with immunity. He will find you.”  

“And blow his cover trying to sneak me out? No. He is more useful than we are right now. I’ll get out myself. Just… trust me. And leave Solo out of it. Let him work. Over.”        

She anticipates Illya’s grumble, and all the plotting he’s winding through his brain without consulting her. Then he pipes up, at last, “Fine.”        

“I’m going to take a look,” Gaby decides. She feels for the caribiner on her belt, unclips it, unwinds the cord and lets it fall to the cave floor with a dull  _thwip_. She turns her back on the rubble, taking in the black expanse of the tunnel. She can’t see her own hands. “I bet you have the torch in that bag, don’t you? Over.”

"Perhaps you should have taken your turn to carry it.”        

Gaby scoffs. As if he hadn't insisted otherwise for the whole climb. 

“You still have my knife,” he reminds her, quiet.         

“Yes.” It weighs in her right boot, dark and thin. She doesn’t pause to think too hard about it; its origin is a daydream that distracts, and she needs a clear head. “Good luck. Don't do anything stupid. I'll be back in an hour.”      

“Gaby.”  

"What?"

"Be careful."    

She softens, unwillingly. “Natürlich.”


	2. A Man of Patience

**Illya**

 

They hadn’t attracted any attention. With all the commotion during the wave, the cave-in hadn't made a single ripple in THRUSH’s routine. The air traffic has resumed regularity — the wreckage fires snuffed out, the casualties tallied —  and, with this open vantage point finally working with him rather than against him, Illya watches the guards assume their rotation. He is safe up here in the shadow of the rock, unscathed, undetected. Had he been alone the mission so far would be going, as Waverly would put it, swimmingly.   

But he isn’t alone — or at least he shouldn’t be.   

Spread out on the precipice in front of him, Illya’s inventory is sparse. No matter how he arranges the gases, the powders, the darts, his frustration only grows. Designed to drop THRUSH combatants quickly and quietly, they are all nonlethal. A very unsatisfying arsenal. But every prior agency’s attempt at forceful entry has failed. One condition for U.N.C.L.E.’s deployment had been the demand for stealth and, besides its shutdown, minimal disruption of the operation, preserved for investigation. 

Illya had fought the ruling and lost. Orders are orders.  

But he does have Gaby’s Walther.   

Gunfire, even suppressed by U.N.C.L.E.’s most capable silencing technology, is prohibited. No translation needed; this is the allocation of Illya’s hands before his bullets. After insisting that Gaby should have access to a firearm, and rejected, and after an upturned chair and enough pacing to wear a hole in Waverly’s carpet, plans were altered. Minimally. Illya had to understand; with his last mission hanging over U.N.C.L.E.’s head like the sword of Damocles, and the fate of the agency resting on this deployment, Waverly needs risk at a minimum. A body count at its lowest; Illya at his least volatile. These things come in pairs, he'd said. So, a bargain. At U.N.C.L.E. HQ, with their dispatch to Switzerland at dawn, Illya is granted permission to shadow Gaby and her work indefinitely. He will be a weapon where she, by strict order of Interpol, could not wield one of her own.   

But he isn’t with her.  

Illya’s fingers start to seize and tremble. He wants to tear through the rock with his bare hands.  

Two days into the climb, he had caught her applying topical aid to her scars in the middle of the night.   

He checks the Walther’s chamber again, and again. He hadn’t found the right moment to give it to her. A stupid, selfish oversight, wanting the gesture to be _right_. If he’d only swallowed his pride he could have given it to her. She would have had a chance. He’d hesitated like a boy, as he has always hesitates with her. What had held him back? Any reason is pathetic to him now. The thought that it would disgust her, his prioritising sentiment over professionalism. His refusal to obey direct orders. How she’d hate him; why should she need a gun where he didn’t? _What is he trying to say?_

And his most latent fear. What if Gaby had been glad for it? Illya turns the pistol in his hands, just as she would if it were in hers. What if, like slipping his only knife into her boot, the gesture could have changed everything...? 

All ridiculous speculation. He is too late. With thanks to his school boy nerves, Gaby is alone in the underbelly of THRUSH, and he is only able to dwell on his stupidity for never having taken the risk. 

He’ll accept the punishment at HQ. He craves it, the discipline. They have all been so soft on him since he’d failed them last. 

Alongside the feathery weapons are plenty of hefty, ungainly items which mean little to Illya now he’s up here and alone. Their tent, their sleeping bags, pots for boiling water and heating their provisions. Had everything gone according to plan, he and Gaby could have evacuated the base tonight, and these items could have been disposed of. Now he's stuck with them. With the mission's trajectory on hold until Gaby reports back, he resents them for clinging on.    

Where is she now? How is she faring with only the clothes on her back, his knife in her boot?  

Illya leans back against the rock and snaps off his caribiner. He looks over Gaby’s rations, her dry shampoo, her rolled up socks. He inhales deep, exhales slow. It is still a warm thing to him, her belongings. She is like a miniature. He is not used to it. He has sustained bruises for waving her small boots at her like a ring of keys. For doling out her meals too generously, commanded to stop after three mouthfuls. For stealing her much warmer gloves, though the fingers wouldn't pass his second knuckles if he had. And yet her belongings are perfect for her, tailor-made, and she doesn’t question them at all. He wonders if she finds his belongings funny too. If she likes it, just as he does, all this teasing. She had mocked his big boots of course, and chided him for eating too much, and complained of his height stretching the tent when he lay down flat. He has come to enjoy that too. Perhaps too much. Now, out on the precipice, her balled up socks beside his own is a sight he indulges in. Thoughts of mixed laundry, shared drawers, a washing line with dark sweaters and bright blouses in neat little rows.  

Illya stuffs it all back into the rucksack.    

The sun is due to set. So high on the range, he will be able to watch it sink under the earth and dip the world into icy, lightless cold. He will lose sleep tonight. For once it won’t be for Gaby being within arm’s reach but because she’s isn’t. She will sleep in the lion's den, no provisions, no light nor sense of time. Until she bids him to infiltrate the heavily-manned entrance he is stuck here. That had been the agreed delegation; Gaby to lead, Illya to follow. Gaby to work, Illya to brush away the prints.    

She had been a master of her own panic. Her file details her discomfort in dark, enclosed spaces; a rational fear and a common one.

Illya hadn't been. As he'd dangled from the yellow cord, the sweat that crawled between his shoulders had gone cold and clammy, as it does after witnessing death. That sick drip had brought a sourness in the mouth, a distortion of his vision — Gaby had been crushed. The rubble and wreckage had dropped right by his head, and with the shriek of the blast he'd known nothing but a bone-deep dread, a raw fear like a child's. He'd snatched onto the cord holding him up, but the hardest thing he’d clung to was the transceiver on his chest; held it until it risked cracking open and springing free of its circuitry, until his knuckles turned bone white and bloodless, held onto it like it was her.  

Illya opens his signal, already muttering her name into empty space before he realises he’s doing it.     

She’s too far in. Until she's close enough to pick up his frequency again, he'll have nothing but the transceiver’s whirring feedback.  

As the sun drops behind the peaks and darkens the lowest reaches of the range, the floodlights of the base camp come to life. The milling of black-clad guards begins to slow and thin out, and the fires in the shacks glow an inviting, flickering orange. It’s bizarre in all the monochrome of the landscape; white snow, black rock. Like a strengthening heart beat it’s impossible to ignore, insistent, demanding. Now that Illya has paid attention to it, it will not go away.  

He could progress alone. He could attempt the descent. With his experience of THRUSH’s combat tactics, he could defeat them with ease. They are only perimeter defence, and dulled after a full day of rotation. Now, as the day shift winds down and long before the night shift begins, he could strike with great advantage.    

But first he needs her order. The notion of abandoning Gaby in that place without confirmation is unthinkable. Only sixty minutes. He tries not to look at his watch; the thirty minutes he knows he has endured turns out to be only five, and he is trying to stay calm. To be rational, tactical, unemotional, as she would be.    

He will be as good as dead to her if he leaves.   

So he won’t leave.   

He will watch the nocturnal movement of the base camp in the valley. That will be worth something to them both when she comes back.   

Illya scowls, cracks his knuckles, breathes white into the cold, and waits.    

   

 

 

**Napoleon**

 

Napoleon Solo stretches his arms over the curved rim of the Jacuzzi. Sans the glaringly distasteful context, he might equate this place to heaven. All soft paper lanterns, mountain view, white hot jets kneading deep into the tissue of his back. In his right hand rests a crystal glass of fine scotch. In his left is an ornate pocket watch, offered up for his admiring gaze by the man he has been ordered to arrest.    

“It was my father’s,” the man sighs, topping up his own glass with an amber so rich it coats the sides. “A last of Louis Cartier’s, the only one of its kind. Priceless.”  

It isn’t. Napoleon has fenced an identical one before. But they do fetch a pretty penny. Enough to retire on, if he weren't a man of such moral fortitude these days. He turns the timepiece in his fingers, glances at its opalescent face.    

The wave ought to have detonated by now.    

He considers his partners, deciding that the impending sense of doom he feels for them isn’t correct for present company. He pretends instead to study the timepiece in more depth. The thought of Illya’s uncomplicated wrist watch and Gaby’s acrylic earrings crushed among the rubble is not something to dwell on here.    

This languid afternoon is an exercise in trust. No communicator pen in his top pocket here, no tracker in his shoe in all this nudity. It is only another test, like that of the machine. This is not the first time he has been in such… open forum with the Laurent twins individually. Each instance in that respect has been enough to convince them of his cover; he doubts they have unpicked him as anything more than a rich, impressionable playboy. After proving them right, they are certainly keener to keep him around.   

“It’s quite a piece,” Napoleon offers.   

“Evelyn was always very close with father. Their lineal traits are remarkable. How alike they are, even now. There is no stronger bond than that of a father and his son.” The sentiment, completely dead in tone and sincerity, drifts from across the room — his second mark, Philippa Laurent. Older by minutes but far more vivacious than her brother, she perches on a bamboo bench with her robe tied and a leg bobbing on her bent knee. With Napoleon’s deliberate quiet, her blue eyes go round and her mouth follows suit, a hand rising to cover her gasp. “Oh, Richard, I’m ever so sorry.”   

Napoleon waves it off.    

“Now, Pippa,” chides Evelyn, refilling Solo’s glass. “There’s no need for that. I’m sure he completely agrees. Johnson advanced his family line admirably, and Richard is a fine example of his father’s well-spread contribution. There is nothing to grieve now. Nothing to do but embrace the opportunity to build on his father’s legacy, as we have.”   

The nonchalance of Evelyn Laurent often makes Napoleon’s spine prickle. True to form, he swallows down his distaste for the man’s ideals as he resigns for the thousandth time to side with him. Like eating far too many rich foods, Napoleon’s body does its best to hold down everything he knows he should spit back up. This sort of work is not new to him, but it never gets easier. This cover is deep, and unpleasant, but after two long months he will not have it all be for nought.   

“Finely put, Evelyn,” he says, and leaves it at that.    

If Solo’s father truly had passed away very recently, and if Solo truly were an heir to a fortune pumped into THRUSH’s research division, perhaps he would be hurt. But Napoleon Solo is not Richard Frye, long lost son of the late Johnson Frye, the millionaire landowner and colonist, whom THRUSH has doted on as a sponsor for fifteen years. Napoleon is not the next in line to be wined and dined to keep THRUSH in his favour. He is not contributing one cent of his own to this diabolical facility, and so he is not wounded one bit.  

Instead he is only impressed by Philippa Laurent’s sly cruelty, which he knows to be punishment for his behaviour last night. The woman had not appreciated his rejection of yet another open invitation. Napoleon had instead vanished to the guest wing of the Laurents’ sprawling Alpine estate, keen to contact Waverly with his findings and to hear more of Gaby and Illya’s progress. These midnight conferences are his only refuge.   

Because he has been subject to the Siblings Laurent’s whims for two months, and there is only so much one man can take of two fully-grown bickering, classist lunatics fighting for his attention. Needless to say the whiskey and the hot tubs and the ski lodges and the fondues have softened the blow somewhat, but their possessiveness is just as suffocating as it is useful. He can’t shake them. He is so used to being the pursuer, working hard to glean information. Certainly they aren’t jumping at the chance for him to read their secret diaries, but they will not leave him alone to steal them if he could. Every opportunity to dig deeper into the operation is met by coy flirtation or distraction in sport, gourmet cuisine, or the showing off of another dubiously acquired artefact.   

It could be worse; he is very close to a breakthrough — a confession worthy of taking them both down, and their late father’s operation with it. He needs only to hold their attention for a while longer to get to the facility. They are the key to infiltrating the impenetrable zones and to get to the root of the machine. If he’s lucky, U.N.C.L.E.’s work here could save the agency’s skin, _and_ finally sink THRUSH’s entire operation once and for all.   

The lights go out.   

The Jacuzzi settles to a warm, clear bath.   

“Evelyn?” says Philippa.   

“I think we may have missed the detonation,” says Napoleon, affecting a touch of disappointment. He holds the pocket watch up in the dim lantern light for Evelyn to confirm.   

Evelyn flicks open his cigarette lighter and leans over Solo’s shoulder. “The first wave is complete.” Though it has been at the forefront of the man’s priorities all week, he sounds typically bored. He shakes out his lighter, drops it in his trouser pocket. He slips the watch from Napoleon’s hand too, tucks that back into his trim waistcoat. “Shall we take a look?”   

Philippa’s magazine slaps on the floor as she hops to her feet. “Finally! Come along, Richard.”   

Napoleon steps out of the shutdown Jacuzzi, disregarding their wandering gazes as he pulls on his robe. Even being looked at by them has become irksome.    

“What are the odds on catching the next one?” he says, but Richard Frye has played this card before. Napoleon is only pleased his cover as a petulant heir can excuse such endless needling. This is hardly his neatest work to date, but he's losing steam, fast. “I’m only sorry my father had to miss it.”   

Evelyn casts a chill look over his shoulder, holds the door to usher his sister onto the balcony. “Have patience, Richard. We aren’t stringing you along for nothing.”   

Napoleon gives him a meagre smile.    

The sooner he can get ahold of Gaby and Illya, the better.   

He only hopes there’s something left of them.    

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [drinks 14 cups of espresso, stuffs exposition into a t-shirt gun, **LETS LOOSE** ]
> 
> I promise Illya's wallowing is mostly necessary..... I know you can't trust me on this, but I promise. Also how much do I love Napoleon Solo??? With all my heart, that's how much. With all my heart. What I wouldn't give to buy him a hot tub devoid of villains...... Gaby's back in the next chapter with all lack-of-guns blazing, too...... I missed her for these 2800 words!! 
> 
> You thought I'd walk smoothly away from the rich evil twins trope? Do you know me at all!?!? I'm garbage.
> 
> Also, turns out Richard Frye was the name of a very real, very impressive man - something I panic-googled (in case of... idk... legal action for my associating him with fictional villainous operation THRUSH...??) before posting this chapter. And an interesting man at that! I read all about him when I ought to have been writing chapter 3. I promise that nothing about Solo's cover story is inspired by this Scholar/Real Life Indiana Jones. It's all entirely coincidence, but I can't for the life of me come up with an alternative name that sticks! So, Real and Late Richard Frye, my apologies. I hope you'll be pleased by Solo's retaliatory behaviour towards crazed, classist warmongers in the next 8 chapters or so...!


	3. A Mind to Strike

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun! Hovering over foreign phrases will (should) show their translation - if you're on a mobile or a tablet, translations are in the end notes too!

**Gaby**

 

  

Illya, of course, responds in seconds.   

“It could be an airlock between the caves and the facility,” she tells him, tracing the cold grooves of the rock. “The maintenance room from the prints.”       

Feeling her way through the tunnel had been painfully slow. In absolute pitch black, each blind step had insisted on sweeping her boot ahead of her, testing the pressure in case anything gave way. Had Illya been there, she would have made no such progress. His fearful shadowing of her, like a new mother...

Granted, Gaby’s anxiety had flared up more times than she would like to admit. It had tested her, the blindness. Navigating new and unpredictable ground with no landmarks to work with, no instinctive direction. Worse — her guiding hand on the damp wall had slipped so often into thin air. From smooth concrete tunnelling to split open crevasses, the shock had made her lurch and skip a beat, like missing a step on a staircase. Gaby could only gauge the size of the place from the echo of a cough, the wet air catching in her chest. Scuffing a pile of rocky fragments at the slope’s edge only sent them skittering down, fathomless. She hadn’t heard them land.    

When the tiny red dot of a safety light had glowed in the black, a pinprick from all the way down the tunnel, Gaby could have leapt for joy.      

“Yes. An airlock.” Illya pauses. She pictures him frowning in his way as he mulls it over. “There will be scanners inside. For authorisation, identification.”           

“I’ll work something out.” Before he can demand an eight-page breakdown, she hurries on; “Any luck on your side?”               

“No,” he grouses. “Technicians have arrived to maintain radio towers. This ray interferes with satellite signal, also. I doubt they accounted for this. It will take a long time to recalibrate.”           

“A lot of faults for a first attempt. They must be in a hurry.”           

“Or their target is closer than they thought,” Illya suggests grimly. Gaby pulls a sour face in the dark.  

THRUSH’s target is obscure. So far the organisation’s foes have scaled from individual members of political parties to the free world at large, and always, reliably, to U.N.C.L.E. and its sister agencies for getting in the way. Generally, Waverly had said, it is safe to assume that THRUSH is willing to destroy any obstacle to their objective: ultimate, unparalleled power.   

Interpol has not ruled out a first step of mere national ransom. One influential country in isolation, held hostage to the organisation’s ideals. Using the ray to broadcast their demands on every radio in every home, THRUSH will begin the thorough cleansing of those they deem ‘undesirable’. This plan is no surprise. In THRUSH's previous surges of activity, they have made this repeated intention very clear. They are the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity. Totalitarianism without one government, without one state. Only one world, flattened beneath one organisation's boots. 

Because the satellite systems and the rush of foreign, untraceable tech certainly suggest global intent. Where better to deploy a ranged weapon than in the heart of Europe? First Switzerland, and then rippling through the countries encircling it; a concentrated disease of the heart spreading to the blood, the limbs, the extremities, until the entire body yields.     

Despite THRUSH's tendency to brag, the intelligence world still knows little. With the fate of the world at stake, and with a string of failures in its wake, U.N.C.L.E. HQ knows even less.

They _do_ know that the ray utilises ultrasonic and electromagnetic power. 

They know that the power harnessed in the new weapon can drop three military aircraft without one rocket fired.

They know that with the ray active, the mountain range is impenetrable by man or machine.

They know that man fares worse.

Empty handed, with all non-THRUSH tech and weaponry rendered useless, more harm comes to the agent’s mental state than to his equipment. _Irreparable psychological damage_ , Waverly had reported, obscured by clouds of blue pipe smoke - heavier lately, with the toll of this pivotal assignment. _An unfathomable, inconsolable fear response._  

“I do not like this,” Illya tells her now, firm. “This arrangement. It is… sloppy. We need new tactic.”    

Typically Solo’s ideas are the first to meet Illya’s scrutiny, but Gaby is not immune. His tolerance for her input is due to come to an end. No matter how his guilt has humbled him, she will never be exempt from the ironclad certainty of the KGB’s best.    

“Like what, Illya? We’re hardly spoilt for choice.”    

“I will find second entrance. It is useless sitting here, waiting. I am KGB.”    

Gaby rolls her eyes so hard they might stick there, glowering at the back of her skull. “KGB are more than capable of sitting still for one hour. Surely you have worked a stakeout before? Interrogated innocent civilians for weeks at a time?”    

He ignores the slight. “It is not the same. Stakeout has approximate time frame, objective, leads. This is useless. For you to return to debrief each hour is waste of time — already we are behind schedule by two hours. We are still no closer to disarming the weapon. No. I will look for the second entrance, and you will meet me there, get me into the facility.”    

“No.”    

“No?”    

“No!” The ache in Gaby’s hand becomes a harsh cramp, and she forces herself to loosen her grip on the radio. “No. You have barely even looked at the aerial photographs, Illya. You won’t find the second infiltration point, not without me. This signal won’t reach that far - the first wave did some real damage. I don’t think the transceivers will take another one… And I won’t be stuck in this... this bloody cave forever while you’re dead in the snow, just because you’re too stubborn to let me work.”    

“Stubborn!”    

“Yes! Stubborn!”    

He scoffs. “I think perhaps you have hit your head.”    

“You—!” Gaby seethes. That know-it-all little hum of his! She breathes deep to prepare an entire tirade when he clicks back in:  

“We cannot predict this. No more improvisation. First detonation was early, has thrown off our speculation completely. No word from Solo, and you demand we do not contact him. So what is there to do? I wait for you to come back with reconnaissance which, even after one hour in waiting, could be worthless. There is nothing to work with here. Nothing to do. There is a door, which you did not open—”    

“Because you insisted I came back here!”    

“Schedule is lost. Plan is worthless. We have no foundation. Solo has not reported approximate activation schedule of the weapon. He is stuck. We are stuck. But we can move, so we will. I find second entrance, you infiltrate the facility via this 'maintenance room' of yours, and we meet. It is the only way.”    

“Well we took your ‘ _only way_ ’ in Gdańsk, and look what happened.”      

It had fallen out of her, the petulance of it. Like a child would repeat an insult she doesn’t understand; no sincerity, no intent but meaningless cruelty.     

He hasn’t switched off his transmitter, though. She knows this. It is only a punishing quiet.  

Hurt prickles in Gaby's chest. She doesn’t like to be cruel to him. His world is cruel enough to him already.   

“Give me one more shot,” she bargains. It’s a phrase of Solo’s, an old joke, and it has worked on Illya before. “I will get into the maintenance room, find an area map. A radio, if there is one. I will contact you from there. Then we will try your way.”  

Nothing.  

“Illya,” she tries. “I need to rely on you this time.”    

If he were in the room, he would be pacing. He may be pacing outside, or tapping his arm in his way, glowering. Somehow it is worse not being able to see it for herself. Worse only knowing, unable to shoot him a reassuring look over Solo’s neat head, as they are so used to.    

“It will be all right,” she offers. “We’re good at this.”    

“I do not want another Gdańsk.”      

Gaby smiles sadly. “There won’t be another Gdańsk.”    

His transmission holds on. She can hear the mountain wind from here, and the shift of his coat, his thick gloves curling so close to the receiver.   
  
"Du kannst sich auf mich verlassen," he says.

 

"Ich weiß.”

She does rely on him. Feeling powerless isn’t a foreign affliction to Gaby, and being suppressed where she knows she is capable is no stranger either. She knows it means to him, having to relinquishing his skills here. There are so many questions she has for him, and more accusations still, but this is not the time to bicker over rank, or delegation. He is her partner. More. She relies on him, despite Gdańsk, and despite his endless nannying thereafter.     

“Listen in on Solo. Don’t make contact yet; he must be close to a breakthrough by now. He doesn’t need the distraction. Just... Maybe the assets are talking about the test.” She waits for him, likely still filling the radio silence with his mutinous grumbling. “Illya.”        

“Affirmative.”      

“Don’t move. Don’t make contact. Everything will be fine.” She doesn’t know what makes her say it, but she feels it’s what he wants to hear, “We’ll be fine.”       

“You don’t know this.”       

“Illya. I need you to say you won’t make contact with him.”       

“You will contact me in one hour,” he says instead.   

“I will be back as soon as I can.”           

“Better: find stronger radio. Enter the facility, get this map. We will work from there.”     

“And you won’t drag Solo into this.”    

“You keep your word, I will keep mine.”       

“Good.”       

“Be careful,” he murmurs, a habit he will not set down. “Over.”          

Gaby rolls her eyes. “Natürlich.”          

    

    

Even without her kit, picking the lock is a piece of cake. A humble thing, like that of a broom cupboard. That same tiny red bulb -  flickering still with the last dregs of power before the collapse had cut off its live current - is the only electrical facet on the door. The security had been laughably lax. Nothing but a garden variety lock and key, barely a warm-up exercise for a student of Napoleon Solo’s haughty tuition.    

Her ponytail is a mess with her hairpins pulled to pieces, but it’s hardly the worst damage she’s sustained so far. She pulls out her hair tie only to knot it back tighter, and flicks on the light.          

Rows and rows of searing fluorescents have Gaby yanking down her tinted goggles, cursing herself until she can stand the glare; how it shrinks her pupils to pinpricks.   

But it is the maintenance room after all, with plenty of promising looking consoles lining and bisecting the room. Judging by the mass and complexity of the setup, this operation is on a far grander scale than they had anticipated.          

Gaby recognises none of the equipment. These machines don’t match up with the seized THRUSH schematics she’d studied in her dossier, nor the circuitry Illya had spent hours trying to twist into something comprehensible, or even remotely interesting to her. It’s not cogs and gears. She tends to leave the delicate stuff to U.N.C.L.E.’s own technicians, and to Illya, just as they leave her in HQ’s garage with no holes barred.          

Laying her palms flat on the closest desk, Gaby leans in close to the curved console screen. Though there is a hum of activity in the room, a drone like a wasp’s nest, this screen, like every other, is a lifeless black.  

An aimless push to the key pad beneath it has the tubes flicker to life. A bird in flight - a thrush - glows in a pattern of 0’s and 1’s, with an empty form beneath. The blinking cursor patiently awaits her input.  

Gaby stares, utterly blank. She doesn’t have a pass code. She barely knows what this thing is running on, never mind the consequence of an incorrect entry. Where is the mainframe? The reeling magnetic and paper tapes, the mysterious humming cabinetry taking up one half of the room? Set into slanted ivory-coloured desks of dials and meters she can’t begin to fathom, these consoles are closer to televisions. Though she will admit she doesn’t have one of these typewriter-looking things affixed to her television set in London. These consoles are counter-intuitive in their baldness, their sealed up plastic casings. Ugly, she thinks, and loves with a quick rush the uncomplicated, open guts of cars.

No. She will admit this branch of tech is Illya’s domain. After all, every console here requires the state of the art authorisation Illya had detailed to her at HQ. Retinal and fingerprint scans, indestructible dovetailed locks, and serial numbers to be keyed in a designated time frame, or else risk complete shutdown. Waverly had been right. THRUSH’s advancements are unlike anything the intelligence world has ever seen. Despite every attempt of every sister agency's experts, the methods and materials are untraceable to a single creator. Nothing on file can link these creations to a known culprit. All of them are a mess of influences and techniques, a tangle of architects. 

So where has it all come from?       

It’s just part of the mystery they’re dispatched to solve. The ray, the satellites, the physiological damage dealt by the fallout - all secondary to the first question, the most pressing: _who is the creator?_  That enigma alone is enough to bring down the operation for investigation, before THRUSH’s threats become very real, very imminent execution.    

Gaby’s bafflement over the new tech does not come without discouragement. She is not one to face a challenge and turn down a chance to tackle it. Orders not to disrupt the facility itself had been paramount; HQ need as much untampered evidence as possible for testing.        

But she has seen the key card activated door across the room.   

And she _does_ know how to take things apart.          

She starts with the accessible wires, plucking them out like weeds. This isn’t bomb disposal. These ports and cables are more like HQ’s switchboards, like audio leads in Soho’s dance clubs. Telephone wires, lighting, PA systems. Easy enough to replace, once the damage is done.

Enough to stir a guard into leaving his post to investigate, if she makes enough mess.          

She turns off the light, crouches beneath a desk, and soon enough her wish is granted. A wish Illya would probably burst a blood vessel over, if he were here. The door sweeps wide open, spreading a trapezium of yellow across the concrete floor.  

Gaby follows the white beam of a torch cutting through the shadows. The light draws her like a moth, promising a far easier return to the cave-in — and to a furious Illya — if she could only snag it for herself…       

The guard flicks the light switch by the key carded door. Nothing – Gaby's meddling had made sure of that. He huffs, more weary than irritated, and gives the room a full sweep of his torch.           

When his knees pass the desk, Gaby holds her breath.         

The torch is fixed to the barrel of an assault rifle.          

She plucks Illya’s knife from her boot, holds it steady at her ankle.          

But a _gun_?          

She wouldn’t be quick enough. And blood is messy. No doubt another guard will come along looking for this one after a hail of panicked gunfire. Even if he didn’t get a chance to shoot, a discovered pool of blood would be more than enough to put the place on lock down, with security already on high alert after the wave. 

Blunt force might do it. One well timed, well placed thud to the back of the head. She could always stick Illya’s knife in him if he threatened to turn. 

She’s silent. As he makes another sweep down the aisle of consoles, Gaby moves like a cat after him. Crouching, she watches him kick filing cabinets like her customers kicked car tyres at the garage; peering around aimlessly, pretending to know what to look for. She makes use of his inattention to tuck Illya's knife back into her boot, and to carefully unhook the fire extinguisher from the wall.    

He flicks another switch, fruitless.

"Mach _schon_..."

Gaby halts dead. Her language is intimate here, after so long, and it feels like a rebuke. Like he knows she’s there, that it’s her, and she ought to know better, do better.          

Gaby swallows, and strikes— 

“Arrgh! Huh—?!”       

— twice.       

He drops like lead, bashing into the desk on his way down.       

Snatching up the rifle, she shines its light down at his slackened face. Though he is tall – it had taken a far stretch to hit the back of his head - he is young, possibly just a late teenager. She supposes that’s good enough excuse for the job apathy. Gaby hovers over the trigger, nudges him with her foot.  

Nothing. 

She gets to work.          

“ _You won’t fool them_ ,” Illya had said once, in Helsinki. Gaby shrugs out of her white coat now, steps out of her salopettes. “ _You are too small._ ” 

Solo had scoffed. “ _Peril, give the girl a chance. It's about time you passed the torch for the most horribly unconvincing cover."_      

Gaby smiles in the dark, pulling the cargo trousers up over her thermals. The pockets are weighted. In them: cigarettes, a spare magazine for the rifle, a couple of Swiss chocolates she recognises and devours in one.          

“ _So I’ll wash off my makeup, spit on the floor_ ,” she’d said. “ _It really isn’t so hard_.”          

She can hear Illya’s answering grumble now, as if he’s right there with her.           

Besides, it’s not as if she’s going to cosy up in the barracks. She only has to blend in from a distance once she’s inside; the right camouflage to a turned-eye – which most of these eyes will be, if they are all bored young men. And even if a bored young man _were_ to spot a doe-eyed woman, so clearly lost on her way to the desk of the man in charge? She might as well just take off all her clothes and strut into the laboratory herself.

Gaby smirks, wipes her hands on her new, ill-fitting trousers. She stuffs her white mountaineering apparel into a deep drawer of the farthest desk.

She gets back to work, plugging the wires back where they belong, or thereabouts. All that's left are the final touches; the guard’s cap to hide her hair, his badge pinned to her lapel, and her transceiver tucked away in her sleeve pocket.  

She's sweeping the room for a map on the wall when she sees it.       

It looks like a radio, at least. There is a frequency tuner, a volume dial. And like the consoles, there is a small square scanner on the top. Gaby recognises the grey spiral on its face, that universal invitation to lay down a fingerprint.         

She considers the boy on the floor.

Shrugs.     

It takes a great deal of strength to manoeuvre an unconscious body. To think, she’d scorned Solo in HQ’s gymnasium only days before he’d assumed his cover here; an impromptu, unasked for crash course in self defence. Illya had been glaringly absent, had probably put the man up to it himself before skulking off. " _You’ll thank me for this someday_ ," Solo had said, before dropping his entire, boneless weight back on her.        

Delivering a hard slap and a threat of broken fingers to this body won’t make it get up and owe her a drink.       

She has to jolt the guard up by the waist, slap down his hand on the console to push his index finger onto the square.        

The spiral under his finger flickers alight.       

With a flat red X.       

She huffs and adjusts the weight in her shaking arms, wrangles his index and middle fingers. Both hands.  

The box shuts down, every light falling dim. 

Gaby drops him.       

What rank is he? A _doorman_? She squints down at his badge on her chest, and is at a loss for the total lack of embellishment, the blank bar where the stripes of his privileges ought to be.  

Still, the badge will work. He got in here from the facility, so at least she will be able to get out. 

Not without briefing Illya, she won’t. He has her word. 

She pictures him, on the sixtieth minute of her absence, barrelling down the mountain to tear apart radio towers and satellite dishes and every guard encircling them. 

Gaby clenches her fists, releases them with red crescents deep in the flesh of her palms. She itches to progress, to push forward. The badge would get her through; if she were alone she could infiltrate without this shackle. Get the job done, no consultation needed. At the garage she had always worked alone. The calm yellow glow of her lamp beneath the cars, the radio crackling football commentary on her workbench, her coffee burnt but her elbows unknocked by bystanders looming over her, checking in on her. There is much to be said for working alone.  

So she will return to her partner at the cave-in, and they will still be three hours behind schedule. What is one more hour to them? They are the fifth agency deployed to take down the facility, and there is no “fifth time lucky” in German lore, or in Russian.  

Gaby snatches up her radio, pushes blindly for transmission.  

Dead silence. Of course. 

Yet...

How many times has Gaby worked with the instinct that flickers in the corner of her vision? Seen it in headlights turning a corner milliseconds before she makes it; in the reflection in a shop window, in the ripple of a puddle in the gutters. She catches things before she can be caught out herself. It’s an inherent gift to Ossi girls, she thinks. A protective flinch. In her head full of what-ifs and what-nexts, it is all too easy to miss out a blatant invitation when she sees one — here, the glowing white bird of 0's and 1's, still glaring accusingly at her from across the room. 

Gaby, with little to lose, still approaches on soft soles as if the thing might explode. 

The badge is low ranking, but it does have information that could prove useful. A name: Hesse, Frederik. A class: D. A serial number, 12 digits. 

The radio had given her several attempts before its shutdown. Why not the console? The place will be blown to smithereens in due time anyway — by the ray's instability or by called-in aerial assault, once she and Illya have failed yet again — so why not have a mechanic strip the scrap before it's crushed?

And if these attempts are logged and denied, she, the low-ranking Frederik Hesse, is sure to be forgiven for poring over the toys he might aspire to work with one day. No trail, nothing suspicious to follow up on. Harmless, victimless.

Mostly, however, hopeless. 

Nonetheless, Gaby lays the badge on the desk and, stretching her fingers, she pushes out her doubts to recite the number in her head. She has memorised serial numbers for car parts before, could recall them now if someone were to test her. So she recites, and she ghosts the keys as she begins to practise a rhythm, to know this number as well as Hesse might. 

And finally she commits. She pushes each key as fluently as she would dial her own telephone number.  

The screen flickers. 

The white bird disappears. 

Gaby glares over her shoulder at the unconscious lump on the floor, prepared to yank out the console and throw it at him. No radio, no map. What, then? What can she do? She’ll drag the guard back to the cave-in and leave him there, or, with the frustration building in her hands now, hot and rushing through her chest, she could push him down the calcified slopes, listen to him slap all the way down. " _No body count,"_ said Waverly. Great. The last thing she needs is a half-naked body to drag about. 

She flinches for that thought, sudden and ugly. 

Then she spots those headlights again. The instinct, the flinch. Gaby turns back, squints at the very limited interface on the console screen, and the blinking white line there, waiting for her.

“ _Danke_ ,” she breathes. She peers over her shoulder, and takes back the curse for poor young Frederik, who knows nothing of what she is about to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Du kannst sich auf mich verlassen \- You can rely on me.  
> Ich weiß \- I know.  
> Mach schon \- Come on (probably - a bit closer to hurry up, or an impatient "ughHUGHhhghhgh")
> 
> As always, please let me know if this is ugly German! I apparently live this life of ridiculous secrecy by choice and can't find courage to ask even my closest German speaking friends how to say this soppy stuff auf Deutsch.
> 
> This chapter..... killed me. Sorry for the delay! I've been so stuck on this bit and I just need to [flaps hands around] get this out there, wash my hands of it. Take it! It's yours! Let me scurry away into the sands to hide and figure out how on earth to get these idiots out of this one, again. 
> 
> P.S I've missed you all! Thank you for your unwavering support so soon! It means so so much to me. I promise the '...'s and questions will be concluded and answered in due time! xx


End file.
